1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to bridge maintenance. More specifically, it relates to an apparatus that allows a user to remotely paint, clean, and inspect bridge cables.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The United States has roughly 578,000 highway bridges. The average life span of highway bridges is about 70 years and the majority of bridges currently in use were built after 1945. In addition to old age, bridges are particularly susceptible to environmental damage, such as corrosion, cracking, and fatigue, which can affect a bridge's load carrying capacity. Therefore, routine and regularly scheduled maintenance is critical to maintaining the structural integrity of bridges. The potential penalties for ineffective inspection of bridges can be very severe, including the loss of life, the cost to build a new bridge, the loss of business resulting from limited access or detours, the cost resulting from blockage of a major shipping channel, and the environmental damage due to hazardous materials being transported over the bridge at the time of collapse.
Visual inspection and manual repair costs represent a very significant portion of a bridge's maintenance budget. In addition to being expensive, visual inspections and manual repairs are very dangerous. For example, maintenance workers periodically climb and suspend from cable-stayed bridges in order to inspect and repair their cables. Unfortunately, in performing these inspections and repairs, many workers have fallen to their death.
What is needed is an apparatus that allows a user to remotely inspect, paint, clean, and repair bridge cables. However, in view of the prior art considered as a whole at the time the present invention was made, it was not obvious to those of ordinary skill in the art how the limitations of the art could be overcome.